IS ANYTHING
SACRED?
INTRODUCTION
The title of my homily for this Third Sunday in Lent - Year
B - is, “Is Anything Sacred?”
That’s the question that hit me as I reflected on today’s
readings - especially today’s gospel.
SITUATIONS
Have you ever found yourself saying, “Is Anything Sacred?” or
“Isn’t Anything Sacred Anymore?”
What was the situation?
Was it something that happened in the park or on a train or
bus - or even in a church?
Was it something said in a song or a scene in a movie?
Was it the tone in political discourse - in debate - in talk
shows - in conversation with coffee?
November the 6th is a long way off.
Why do we talk differently when we talk about people when
they are absent compared to when they are right there in our presence?
I think our everyday situations - can be looked at - in the
light of Jesus’ everyday situations.
So what are the situations that get you to say, “Is Anything
Sacred?”
What happened?
What was going on?
What triggered the feeling - the mismatch - the something’s
wrong here reaction - the ugly anger in the moment or the situation because we
didn’t expect what was happening to be happening?
TODAY’S GOSPEL: UPROAR
In today’s gospel Jesus walks into the temple area in Jerusalem. It’s near the feast of the
Passover. The place is filled with buying and selling. Something’s wrong. There’s
a discord. Jesus makes a whip out of cords and drives all the animals out of
the temple area. He turns the tables on the money changers. Coins and doves go
flying. Jesus yells out his motive: “Take these out of here. Stop making my
Father’s house a marketplace.” Uproar results. Want to know why they crucified
Jesus - as mentioned in today’s Second Reading? Here’s one reason. Here’s one
scene.
What causes you uproar and agita?
What pushes your buttons?
What does your list of beefs look like?
Abuse of children? Offensive language? Going to a movie with
kids and there’s a scene you didn’t expect? Noise in libraries? People who
write in library books? People late for the play or the symphony and they come
down the aisle rug in the semi-darkness and
their seats are is in Aisle C - numbers 11 and 12 - right in the center middle?
Or a similar moment happens at Mass. The
reader is proclaiming the Second Reading.
Someone walks down the main aisle heading for a seat close to the front
- and the person in that seat doesn’t move in because they are going to give out
communion or they like the aisle seat and the whole center of the church is
watching - and missing the whole Second Reading?
REVERENCE - RESPECT - COURTESY - AWE
What’s going on here is the issue of “awe”.
Where and when do we learn a style of courtesy?
What do we find awesome?
What do we find awful?
What demands our respect?
What do we reverence?
Answers: persons, places and things.
Today’s First Reading gives us a list of commandments -
which have as their underneath bottom line: the sacredness of God, the Sabbath,
each other, marriage, children, neighbor, aliens, animals, property.
When I was at my first assignment on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan in the late 1960’s, someone started a movement to clean our streets
and improve our neighborhood. So on Saturday mornings in the Spring people came
from all over the city to a street - say, “East Fourth Street from Avenue D all the
way up to 2nd Avenue.”
With plastic bags and brooms, shovels and trucks, an army of cleaners cleaned
the street.
Then there was a lot - the lot with lots of stuff. I
often walked down a certain street and there was this small lot in the middle
of that street where a building once stood. It was filled with bathtubs, sinks,
shopping carts with 3 wheels, mattresses, bottles, newspapers, garbage bags ripped
with insides spilling out, etc. etc. etc. It was a place where you dumped what
you wanted to dump and get rid of.
This lot was more difficult to clean than to clean a whole
street. Some folks took the time to find out who owned the property. They got
permissions. They got dump trucks and front end loaders. They went to work on
that lot. Volunteers cleaned it all out. They made brick paths. They got topsoil. They planted grass
and flowers. They built a fenced in area for dogs. They put in some cement
tables - with nice benches.
It took a lot of Saturday mornings, but folks made it
happen. Walking down that street after that - seeing old men playing cards or
chess - seeing grandmothers with little children - going by that open space
that once was a dump, a different feeling would hit me.
Awe was my reaction. “Oooh!” was my sound. If someone
videoed my face when I went by the dump and compared it to my face when it was
a space and place of beauty, I’m sure you could see a vast difference.
Everyone has the ability to feel awe. This is the major
proposition of this homily.
What do you find awesome?
The teenage boy with the skateboard - and a buddy with a video camera - going
down banisters and steps - when looking at a replay goes, “Awesome!” Homeowners and those in charge of maintenance at schools go crazy at scraped paint off banisters
caused by skateboarders.
Some people like Beethoven; some people like Bach; some
people close their eyes and sway back and forth during a Taylor Swift concert.
It’s in us - the possibility of awesomeness as well as
reactions to the gross and the awful - whether it’s graffiti or people talking
in the middle of a great scene in a movie - and we’re crying or emotionally
caught up in the story.
Respect is called for. Consideration of others is called
for. Reverence is necessary.
PROBLEMS RESULT
Problems result when there are differences of how we see
what we see or don’t see - compared to what others see and how they see.
My face twisted. My mouth said, “Ooooooh!” I winced when
someone showed me their brand new blue car that was keyed by somebody in a Mall
parking lot. Someone scratched it along the side from the front door to the gas
cap.
If the culprit who did this - could be caught - what would
they say - if anything? Would it be cruel and unusual punishment to put such a
person in stocks in the city square - like the Dutch did in colonial American times
- with the description of their crime listed next to them? Would they or their
parents have the cash to pay for the restoration? Could their trinkets be sold
for the cost of restoration? How could they be helped to grasp the golden rule?
When it comes to just dumping paper or plastic coffee or
milk shake cups and cardboard wrappers on our parking lot here at St. Mary’s it
seems better to me than in the past. How do we get people to have reverence not
just for their living room floor - but the living room floor of a parking lot?
Do we give a specific class in the school the job of cleaning a street or
parking lot - and surprise, they get the message?
This past week we went with some high school juniors and
seniors to a 4 day retreat in Malvern,
Pennsylvania. Mr. Matt Martelli -
a wonderful teacher at St. Mary’s high school - announces before and after we
get started: “Keep this bus clean. There is a plastic garbage bag up here. Put
your trash in it!”
The team asked that the kids have the same respect and
reverence for the retreat house. I sense that people treat rented cars and
rooms and places with less reverence and care than their own stuff.
Is reverence and a sense of the sacred innate or earned or
learned?
DOES IT START WITH SELF?
How do we gain respect, reverence, a sense of awe?
A few weeks ago, out in the corridor here at St. Mary’s, I
bumped into a couple visiting from somewhere. They dropped into St. Mary’s as
part of a self tour of Annapolis.
First or second graders had been in the church for a kids’ prayer service. The
lady said, “It brought back memories and tears to my eyes when I saw the little
kids walk into church with hands folded.”
Does reverence, respect, awe, come from practice, practice,
practice?
Does the reverence kids who making their First Communion depend upon their parents? How much does the reverence teachers who prepare kids for communion effect what the kids pick up? If they are told to make a throne to
receive the king of kings with their hands - would that excite and insight
their being when they receive Jesus for the first time in communion?
I like to drop into the space of this church - when it’s
empty - quiet - and just imagine the sacredness and history of this place. I
think of the prayers said in this space during the Civil War, World War I, II, the Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi
and Afghanistan Wars. I close my eyes and think of all those baptized, married,
and buried from here. I think of the priests from here serving the Naval Academy
and the Naval Academy people coming up the hill to
worship and pray here. Just as these benches
have gum under the seats - maybe over 100 years old because chewing gum goes well
back into the 1800’s - so too these benches have history sticking to them. I like to sit in here and read Robert Worden’s book on the
History of Saint Mary’s Church. I sense the Jesuits who came here in the early
1700’s and said Mass at the Carroll House on the top floor next door - and on and on and on.
Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos preached and prayed in this church. Do we, do visitors to St. Mary’s, feel the same
awe folks feel when they enter or are at sacred spaces - like St. Peter’s in Rome, the
Grand Canyon, Chartres Cathedral or Lourdes in France, the Lake of Galilee or the Wailing
Wall in Israel?
Would growing in reverence by being in this sacred space
effect and affect how we receive Holy Communion, how we treat each other, how
we visit folks in nursing homes, how we look at baby pictures by overwhelmed
grandparents who meet us at a Lenten Soup Supper, how we feel when we drive by
a cemetery or a funeral hearse and a stream of 25 cars in procession.
CONCLUSION
Is anything sacred?
The answer is, “Yes!”
Rearranging just two letters in the word "sacred" we have the word, “scared” -
and I would hope we would be scared when we and our families and our society
lose our sense of the sacred.
